Abstract

This article argues for a speculative, exploratory approach to literary history
that incorporates information visualization early on into, and throughout, the
research process. The proposed methodology combines different kinds of expertise
— including that of fans and scholars in both literary studies and computer
science — in processing and sharing unique cultural materials. Working with a
vast fan-curated archive, we suggest tempering scholarly approaches to the
history of science fiction (SF) with fan perspectives and demonstrate how
information visualization can be incorporated into humanistic research
processes, supporting exploration and interpretation of little-known cultural
collections.

A Shared-Expertise Approach to Cultural Analysis

In her recent work, How We Think, N. Katherine
Hayles suggests that Digital Humanities (DH) research offers new opportunities
for creative collaborations across disciplines and with "expert amateurs" beyond "academic walls"
[Hayles 2012, 36]. Such collaborations require that we acknowledge the value of different
kinds of expertise, welcome cross-pollination of approaches and promote open
access to rare materials and to analytical activities. In this article, we argue
for a collaborative, shared-expertise approach to literary and/or cultural
collections and showcase our own take on such an approach. The work we present
is the result of the collaboration between an expert amateur who compiled one of
"the most important research archives" of SF [Latham 2010, 161] and scholars in both literary studies and
computer science.

In an attempt to reconsider numerous neglected specimens of proto/early SF and to
devise a DH approach to literary history suited to popular genres, our project
specifically aims:

to investigate how the Bob Gibson anthologies of speculative fiction —
unique, hand-crafted and fan-curated anthologies of SF’s "great unread"
[Moretti 2000, 54] — can contribute to scholarly
assessments of the evolution of SF, and

to develop information visualizations that enable researchers, students,
fans, and the general public to explore the collection from different
perspectives, promoting fluid movement between close and distant reading.

Visualizations are key to our collaborative and exploratory approach. Rather than
using visualizations solely to display the final "results" of our research,
we are experimenting with evolving interactive visualizations in tandem with our
research questions and ongoing investigations of Gibson’s untapped collection of
little-known materials. The visualizations are thus integral to our research
"process", shaping and being shaped by our research questions and
ongoing findings, and are not simply tools used as a means to an end. This
exploratory approach is necessary because very little is known about the primary
materials we are investigating. Moreover, we want to make visible our research
process as it is impacted by digital tools and to remain open to unforeseen
questions and research avenues that arise through our first-hand interactions
with the collection and with the developing visualizations.

In describing this process, our article makes two main contributions: we outline
our emergent method for the study of early SF in the context of the Gibson
Collection, adapting Franco Moretti’s [Moretti 2005] evolutionary
approach to genre, and we demonstrate how integrating information visualization
early on in the research process can support exploration and guide the
interpretation of vast, largely unknown literary collections. We begin by
introducing the Gibson anthologies and their unique characteristics before
describing our theoretical approach to investigating and classifying their
material contents, and the design considerations underlying our visualizations.
Because the focus of this paper is primarily on the value of visualizations
employed throughout the research process, we describe our initial visual
explorations and findings as well as new iterations of our visualizations as
they evolved. Finally, we identify the benefits and limitations of our approach
to early SF as it has developed so far and outline future steps.

The Gibson Anthologies and the History of SF

The Bob Gibson anthologies of speculative fiction are unique compilations of SF
stories hand-crafted by Canadian collector and devoted SF fan, Bob Gibson
(1908-2001). Gibson harvested a wide range of science-fictional materials for
his more than 890 anthologies from primarily English-language magazines
published from the 1840s onwards.[1] He then bound these materials
himself into unique compilations, illustrated many of his covers (see Fig. 1),
and provided for each anthology a hand-written table of contents, which —
significantly — includes symbols through which he rated the "SF content" of
the items he collected (see Fig. 2). Although Gibson left no key to these
symbols, we argue that his system of classification will help elucidate the
history of periodical-based SF.

The Gibson anthologies promise to be of scholarly importance for several reasons.
First, Gibson appears to have archived materials that are routinely neglected in
many scholarly histories of the SF genre. The Gibson anthologies contain a wide
range of literary forms (prose and verse, fiction and non-fiction, short
stories, comics, and serialized novels) and visual art (illustrations and
photographs) in what appears to be an attempt to archive cultural engagement
with science and speculation in many aesthetic forms. Rather than focusing on
"major" works, usually novels, written by
"major" authors, as many scholarly histories of the genre
do, Gibson is attentive to numerous literary and visual forms and a diverse
range of "major" and so-called "minor"
writers who published in popular periodicals, where, arguably, much
experimentation necessary to genre development took place. This means that
Gibson has amassed precisely the ephemeral materials that are "readily overlooked" in scholarly histories of the genre
[Ashley 2000].[3] In radically expanding
the set of materials that "matter", Gibson’s anthologies offer an implicit
challenge to received histories of the genre. Moreover, his anthologies
destabilize existing characterizations of SF that are based on a miniscule
portion of published SF, especially in its earliest years, while neglecting an
abundance of materials that contribute to (but do not quite fit traditional
definitions of) SF.

In choosing to explore Gibson’s own assessment of the genre, we hope to
acknowledge the importance of fan perspectives more generally, but also to
highlight Gibson’s own contribution specifically. His anthologies must be
understood as the work of a particularly industrious fan, an active participant
in the robust tradition of SF fandom well-known for (among other things) playing
a key role in developing "resources for criticism"
[Rabkin 2004, 458]. However, even among this distinguished group, Gibson’s work stands out.
He was a lifelong collector, recognized by other collectors in the international
SF fan community as the one who "had the best stuff," and by university
librarians as a collector who single-handedly collected one of the largest
collections of SF that "rivals the collections of other leading academic
institutions in size and breadth"
[Hemmings 2005]. The significance of his collection was recognized nationally in 2010 as
certified Canadian cultural property [Boyd 2010] and
internationally when included in Science Fiction
Studies’ recent overview of the top SF research collections [Latham 2010]. In Gibson’s more than 40,000-item collection held at
the University of Calgary, the approximately 890 anthologies are a relatively
small part — but no less important for all that, given the uniqueness of their
content.[4] As far as we
know, no other resource undertakes the cataloguing, editing, and classification
of early SF published before the advent of pulp magazines devoted to the genre
the way Gibson’s unique anthologies do. In fact, even an initial perusal of the
anthologies suggests that they have the potential to alter drastically our
understanding of early SF in particular. In the 167 anthologies containing works
published before 1930, that is, before SF is named as such and before the
emergence of pulp magazines devoted to this "new" genre, we
have already identified 83 women writers not mentioned in Everett Franklin
Bleiler’s authoritative bibliography of early SF[5]; their very presence in the Gibson anthologies offers a
substantial revision to accounts of early SF that see this history as dominated
by male writers. Of course, the contributions of these (and many other)
forgotten writers included in the anthologies cannot be fully assessed without
also assessing Gibson’s challenge to the definition of SF and its related genres
that led him to include these writers in the first place.

If the Gibson anthologies offer us the tantalizing possibility of a more rigorous
account of the early years of SF, they also present us with what Matthew Wilkens
calls "the problem of abundance"
[Wilkens 2012, 250] and challenge us to develop new methodologies adequate to the task. In
developing our own method, we adopt Moretti’s conception of genre as a "diversity spectrum" of forms that evolve over time [Moretti 2005, 77] while drawing on Gibson’s anthologies to
guide the detection of formal experimentations in the early years of SF when the
genre is at its most amorphous. We use custom-built information visualizations
to tap into Gibson’s unique expertise, allowing us to explore his own
classification and to promote hypothesis-making and testing, playful
exploration, and serendipitous discoveries.

The potential of information visualization, that is, "the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual
representations of abstract data to amplify cognition"
[Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman 1999, 7], is increasingly recognized for supporting humanistic inquiry ([Jänicke et al. 2015], [Jockers 2013], [Moretti 2005], among others). Information visualization techniques
make visible patterns within data collections that are otherwise difficult or
impossible to see. In this way, information visualization can help to
communicate an argument by providing concise visual evidence (as shown in a
literary context by Moretti [Moretti 2005]). However, we believe
that it can also facilitate more micro-level analyses. As Hayles suggests,
information visualization allows us "both to see large-scale
patterns and to zoom in" to examine specific details more carefully
[Hayles 2012, 77], and, thus, can help balance the
quantitative analyses of distant reading with the thoughtful, deliberative
interpretations of close reading. In addition, we are testing the extent to
which information visualization helps raise new research questions and
hypotheses and, through interactive capabilities, supports the in-depth
investigation of these throughout the research process. One could say that our
experiment is a double one: it explores the early stages of SF’s evolution
through Gibson’s archive even as it explores the use of information
visualization in generating new research questions, hypotheses, and
classifications. Of these two, necessarily entangled, experiments, this paper
will focus primarily on the latter.

Evolutionary Approaches to Science Fiction

Following Moretti, we are interested in studying the evolution of genre by
tracking the successes and failures of "stylistic mutations"
[Moretti 2005, 91]. However — and this is where we divert from Moretti — we do not decide in
advance what counts as a meaningful formal feature[6]. To do so would be problematic in the case
of this little-known body of early SF. While we could track imagined
technological inventions or another widely recognized “novum” of more recent SF,
we instead examine specimens of early SF in a more open-ended fashion to ensure
that we remain sensitive to the unique features of this under-studied moment in
the genre’s evolution. As Moretti himself notes, "when a new
genre first arises […] no ‘central’ convention has yet crystallized"
and, as such, it is "open to the most varied experiments"
[Moretti 2005, 77]; its diversity spectrum is "[q]uite wide"
[Moretti 2005, 77]. Ultimately, we aim to provide a more robust account of the diversity
spectrum of early SF, but our experiment begins with, and is fundamentally
shaped by, the materials meticulously curated by Gibson to acknowledge, as
others have, that fans are uniquely poised to contribute to the study of popular
culture [Hills 2002]
[Jenkins 1992].

To our knowledge, there is to date only one other DH project on SF that also
adopts an evolutionary approach: Rabkin and Simon’s Genre Evolution Project
(GEP). The GEP tracks the evolution of American SF stories published from 1927
onwards through a relational database, which links individual works to major
historical events and keeps track of reprints and translations of stories as
evidence of their "survival" — unlike Moretti’s evolutionary approach,
which tracks the emergence and evolution of formal features rather
than stories. GEP is remarkable for its focus on periodical-based short stories,
its attention to the wider cultural context in which these stories were
published, and for its unique approach to developing keywords for each story.
However, because it begins with stories published in 1927, it effectively skips
over the messiest part of the genre’s evolution.[7]
Moreover, the project’s definition of survival commits it to a major works/major
authors’ approach, which continues to underestimate the contributions of
so-called minor works and writers in the genre’s development. In contrast, we
adopt Gibson’s more inclusive approach and Moretti’s definition of survival
based on formal features to tackle the wide diversity spectrum of an emerging
genre. This approach is already showing the limitations of current scholarly
histories and classifications of early SF, most of which are based on the
features of 20th-century SF rather than the unique features of earlier stages of
evolution.

For the purposes of this exploratory pilot study, we have digitized a subset of
50 Gibson anthologies (those with works that are in the public domain) and
collected data on these 50 and on 22 more anthologies for a total of 72
anthologies, containing the earliest works (more than 1,500 items). We are
collecting metadata on every item, including authors, publication years, plot
summaries, and keyword motifs. This information is stored in a relational
database, which in turn becomes the basis of the visualizations that we are
developing to help us track patterns across items in the anthologies. To
highlight our scholar/fan collaboration, we began by exploring what counts as SF
in Gibson’s system of classification.

Toward a Living Classification

Classification systems are foundational to any human practice of knowledge
production and maintenance, particularly in digital media ecologies where
information must be coded and stored in databases to be digitally accessible.
However, teasing out and exploring the aspects that these systems make
invisible, exclude, and otherwise silently define are equally necessary if we
are to create what G. C. Bowker and S. L. Star call a "living classification"
[Bowker and Star 1999, 326] — a classification that remains flexible and finely tuned to its
parameters and limitations. We believe that the Gibson anthologies — with their
78 "SF content" symbols used by Gibson to classify each item[8] — offer
an opportunity to challenge existing classifications of SF and to explore new
and more flexible systems. The openness of the Gibson anthologies themselves
therefore guides our classification choices and our presentation of these
anthologies, which in turn forms the basis of our database structures and our
visualizations. However, we also recognize the need to compare Gibson’s
classification with well-established scholarly systems to understand more fully
Gibson’s potential contribution to ongoing scholarly work.

We began our efforts to conceptualize the Gibson anthologies by surveying
previous SF bibliographies, dictionaries, and encyclopedias, aiming for a system
that would allow us to classify the formal features, plot devices, and content
of the anthology items. Many compilations were rejected, as they provided only a
broad definition of SF, typically based on 20th-century texts[9]. Others provided a detailed
classification structure, but still focused on full-blown SF and/or canonical
novels, while using terms, such as cyberpunk and nanotechnology, that are
anachronistic to early/proto SF[10]. Similar anachronistic
terms, as well an understanding of "Hard SF" based on problematic
20th-century assumptions about scientific disciplines, inform the classification
structure used by GEP [Rabkin and Simon 2014]. Relying substantially on any
of these systems would superimpose modern definitions of SF onto the anthologies
and inherently exclude much of their content from consideration.

Of the classification systems we reviewed, only Bleiler’s Science-Fiction: The Early Years
[Bleiler 1990] focuses on the rich, porous period of proto-SF and
takes into account early periodical publications, including stories and authors
that may only have been published once. His extensive bibliography covers over
3000 stories written between the third century BC and 1930, with most works
falling between 1870 and 1930. Bleiler also includes a list of nine major SF
motifs that are then divided into sub-motifs, all of which were developed using
terminology drawn from the stories that comprise his bibliography, thereby
minimizing the imposition of anachronistic terms (see Fig. 3). Bleiler’s system
allows us to categorize the diverse science-fictional items in each Gibson
anthology according to the nine major motifs, while also allowing us to account
for these items’ more granular differences through the sub-motifs.

While Bleiler’s system in many ways compliments Gibson’s, their points of
tensions prove at least as productive as their points of similarity. For
example, like many other critics, Bleiler underestimates the importance of the
supernatural in early SF. This is reflected in the positioning of the
supernatural last among Bleiler’s major motifs and in the motif’s title: "Incidental supernatural motifs occasionally found,
particularly in the earlier works"
[Bleiler 1990, xviii]. Furthermore, this motif is the least
differentiated in Bleiler’s hierarchy; in contrast to other motifs, it contains
few sub-motifs (see Figure 3, highlighted in orange), thus limiting the
specificity with which supernatural elements can be coded through Bleiler. In
contrast, our preliminary analysis of the earliest subset of anthology items
shows that Gibson does not exclude the supernatural, but rather seems to suggest
its affinity with SF. In fact, many of the items in our subset include
supernatural elements together with more recognizable SF elements, such as
technology, medical developments, and/or experiences with other worlds or
planets. As we will show in our discussion section, such hybridity indicates
that the supernatural has haunted SF since its beginnings, and that it is modern
understandings, rather than the historical moment, that have sought to exclude
it. Consequently (and perhaps unsurprisingly) such stories, rigorously tracked
by Gibson, rarely occur in Bleiler’s bibliography.

Adopting Bleiler’s motifs does not mean that we neglect relationships such as the
one between SF and the supernatural, nor does it mean that we seek to override
Gibson’s classifications with Bleiler’s. Rather, the productive tension between
Bleiler’s and Gibson’s approaches to categorization highlights the need for
precisely the type of close analysis enabled by Gibson’s anthologies and our
visualizations. Moreover, we are not relying exclusively on Bleiler as a point
of comparison, as we are allowing trends in our data set itself to indicate when
new keywords, perhaps unique to this collection, are needed. These keywords are
being developed through our own reading of the stories, and so continue
Bleiler’s efforts to create keywords inductively from the SF content itself.
Maintaining an open space of interaction between existing systems (Bleiler and
Gibson) and our own emerging classification system allows us to apply multiple
lenses through which to zoom in on the messy areas of early SF that have been
bypassed to this point and to move toward a living classification of SF.

Visualization Perspective

Much like our attempts to classify items in the Gibson anthologies, our design
approach to visualize the items and their connections is exploratory. Before
discussing our early visual experiments and explorations, we will outline a
number of considerations that we began to establish early on in this experiment
to guide our choice of visualization techniques and the design of the
visualizations:

Supporting Open-Ended Explorations: Recent discussions in the
area of Information Sciences (see, e.g. [Marchionini 2006] and
information visualization [Dörk et al. 2011]
[Thudt et al. 2012]) suggest supporting more open-ended, exploratory
strategies toward digital collections, moving beyond query-based search
interfaces. In our project, the ability to examine Gibson’s anthologies in
an exploratory way is essential because of the open-ended nature of the
research questions and because of the need for both researchers and
general-interest users to first familiarize themselves with this unknown
collection. We aim at addressing an open-ended interaction paradigm in the
design of our visualizations.

Addressing a Broad Range of Audiences: An information
visualization ideally enables a dialogue between people and data. The
intended audience (e.g. their interest and background) therefore necessarily
influences the design. Creating a single visual exploration tool that
satisfies the different audiences interested in the Gibson anthologies is a
challenge. The analytical focus of researchers may be difficult (perhaps
even impossible) to reconcile with a more curiosity-driven approach of SF
fans and the broader public. We consider these different motivations and
explore how different types of visualizations can meet these, individually
or in combination.

Linking Different Aspects of the Collection: The metadata we
extracted manually for anthology items provides a rich source for the
analysis of corresponding temporal and contextual patterns. Drawing from and
extending existing visualization techniques, we investigate how this
manifold data can be visually represented individually and in relation to
each other. Similar to previous approaches that have been applied to
cultural collections (e.g., [Dörk et al. 2008]
[Hinrichs et al. 2008]
[Thudt et al. 2012]
[Whitelaw 2015]), these techniques will then be linked to form
a visual exploration tool, wherein the interaction with one visualization
influences the others and shows how the different facets of the Gibson
anthologies relate to each other.

Synergy between Distant and Close Reading: Following up on
Jockers’s argument on macroanalysis [Jockers 2013], we aim at
creating a synergy between distant and close reading by providing a range of
overviews that show the Gibson anthologies from different high-level
perspectives, which act as an entry point into further analysis and
exploration by revealing curious patterns [Shneiderman 1996].
At the same time, we will provide a strong connection to the individual
anthology items so that direct access to, and close reading of, the original
sources is possible at all times during the exploration process.

Aesthetic Considerations: As literary collections are being
made accessible through digital interfaces, we need to find ways to preserve
their unique material and aesthetic character, which fundamentally shapes
our experience and understanding of them. Throughout this project we will
explore how to maintain and convey at least some of the unique visual and
material characteristics of the Gibson anthologies. One approach is to give
the unique hand-illustrated anthology covers a strong presence in the
interface.

Visual Explorations

Our first visual explorations focused on cracking the Gibson code of symbols.
From our work in Special Collections, we suspected that the symbols served at
least two functions. Notes and marginalia left by Gibson indicate that he was
coding for "SF content" but also rating the stories
for the "quality" of such content. However, Gibson’s
notes do not explicitly outline the system of symbols, nor do they provide any
key. Given the sheer number of symbols (26) and the number of items (1513), even
in our relatively small subset of 72 anthologies (out of the total 890), we
brainstormed ways that visualizations might help us explore the meaning of
specific symbols and their relation to other similar-looking symbols. We
therefore relied on both literary studies and computer science perspectives on
the data and its conceptualization, eventually deciding to juxtapose anthology
items and their corresponding Gibson symbols with Bleiler’s motifs through a
radial visualization that correlates these motifs with Gibson’s symbols. The
resulting visual explorations are shown in Figures 4 – 7. As we will explain,
these visualizations helped us begin to characterize the Gibson symbols, helped
make the collection more accessible by beginning to clarify the contents of the
anthologies for users unfamiliar with the collection, and, last but not least,
invited further exploration while helping to generate new hypotheses, research
questions, and new iterations of visualizations designed to help us address
these new hypotheses and questions.

Figure 4 shows an initial visualization that includes an interactive radial tree
diagram (left), which includes Gibson’s symbols at the centre and Bleiler’s
hierarchical motifs in the radiating branches, and is interlinked with a list of
anthology items (right), providing multiple points of entry to explore the
contents of the anthologies. The cluster of circles at the middle of the radial
tree diagram shows all of Gibson’s symbols present in our subset, with the size
of each symbol representing its frequency[11]; for example, we can see that the "dash" and
the letter "F" are the most frequent symbols used in our subset, as they
appear largest. The branches that radiate from centre of the diagram show
Bleiler’s hierarchical motifs, with the stroke weight of each radial branch
representing the frequency of the motif (measured by the number of corresponding
anthology items associated with the motif). The list to the right of the radial
tree diagram shows each anthology item’s symbol, title, author and publication
year with a cover image of the corresponding anthology. This list is an entry
point to more details about each item (e.g., a content summary and a link to the
original item, where available), while also revealing information about the
symbols when a particular symbol is selected. Any selection in one part of the
visualization will result in corresponding adjustments to all other parts that
invite possible hypotheses and/or interpretations.

Figure 5, for instance, shows all the motifs, symbols, and items that correspond
to a selected symbol, a particularly ambiguous Gibson symbol, which might either
be described as a conjoined "JF" or a stylized F with a tail. By reading
the individual stories marked with this symbol, one might suspect that this
symbol refers to "Juvenile Fiction" or "Fairytale", as it includes
titles such as "The Little Mermaid" and "Wyemarke and the Forest Fairies". However, the
visualization brings all these stories together onto one screen, which allows
for easy comparison and confirmation of the hypothesis. Although using database
queries might also lead to similar results, the visualization makes the
discovery much more accessible and immediately meaningful, because it allows the
user to see simultaneously how, for example, these fairytales intersect with
Bleiler’s motifs, how many other stories share this symbol, and what anthologies
and source magazines contain these stories.

The simultaneous communication provided by the visualization is particularly
important for symbols that have hundreds of items associated with them, as in
the case of the "F" or "-" symbols. In order to decipher these symbols
without the help of the visualization, one would either have to retrieve dozens
of anthologies from Special Collections and peruse hundreds of stories, keeping
careful notes of any observable patterns, or scroll through database search
results, all while (again) manually keeping track of observable potential
patterns (which becomes difficult the more items one attempts to track). All
such work would have to be done before being able to develop — let alone confirm
— hypotheses about a symbol’s meaning. With the help of the visualization,
however, certain hypotheses are suggested by the simultaneous visual
intersection of variables (symbols and motifs, and story titles) and can be
quickly ruled out and/or validated. For example, in the case of the "F"
symbol, a perusal of the abstracts and motifs provided in the visualization
reveals that this symbol is not likely related to the stylized F (or JF) that
signifies fairytales or juvenile fiction, as the stories associated with the
"F" symbol are much more eclectic, tend to deal with ghosts,
disappearances and mysteries, and are directed at a more adult audience. This
prompted us to look into the "F" symbol items further, and with the
guidance of Gibson’s marginalia, we now believe that this symbol refers to
"Fortean" stories, stories that focus on unexplainable observed
phenomena. Returning to the visualization and perusing the motifs and abstracts
of stories labeled with this symbol confirms this hypothesis. In the cases of
both the stylized F or JF and the plain "F" symbols, it is clear that
visualization is effectively incorporated into the research process
(which includes more traditional humanistic modes of inquiry such as archival
work), even at its earliest, most exploratory stages, and not, as is often the
case, used solely as a way to showcase results visually.

In addition to Gibson symbols, the visualization offers Bleiler motifs as another
point of entry to Gibson’s anthologies. The nine branches of Bleiler’s hierarchy
are named in the text that surrounds the radial diagram (for comparison, refer
to Fig. 3 and Fig. 4) and, as mentioned, the stroke weight of each radial branch
represents the frequency of the motif. While Bleiler’s numbered hierarchy
suggests an order of importance, moving from the first ranked category,
Ultimates, to the last, Incidental Supernatural Motifs, we intentionally laid
out the hierarchy in a radial geometry that does not privilege certain motifs
over others so that the anthologies themselves could suggest the significance of
certain motifs over others. Selecting a motif highlights its corresponding
branches (in orange) and filters the item list to show all stories associated
with the selected motif and its sub-motifs, while the Gibson symbols in the
middle circle are adjusted to show their distribution within this motif
selection. For example, Figure 6 shows that, so far, 521 of 1513 items in our
subset are associated with the motif branch "Incidental Supernatural
Motifs" and that that this motif is related to 19 of Gibson’s symbols.
Here, the motif to which Bleiler granted the least importance appears in
Gibson’s anthologies to be the most prominent.

Moreover, the visualization shows how the motifs inter-relate. When a motif is
selected, blue branches represent sub-motifs that co-occur with the selected
motif across at least one anthology item (see Fig. 6). Using the blue branches
as a guide to correlations, several motif branches can be selected at once in
order to trace connections between motifs, their associated items, and the
Gibson symbols. For example, while one might expect that the supernatural
remains only distantly related to the development of SF (at least since Darko
Suvin’s highly influential definition of the genre, SF has typically been
defined against the supernatural), this visualization of the Gibson collection
suggests that supernatural motifs are everywhere associated with more common SF
motifs, including technology and a number of sciences, such as Astronomy and
Astrophysics (see Fig. 7). This becomes apparent by selecting the "Incidental
Supernatural Motifs" branch and noting that almost all other branches
co-occur with the supernatural. This in itself is a significant finding in that
it points to possible hybrid genres that likely contributed to the evolution of
SF as we know it and challenges critical attempts to separate SF from other
contributing genres. It also raises questions about the longevity of some of
these sub-genres, which led us to incorporate an interactive timeline into later
iterations of the visualization.

Figure 7.

Selecting several motif branches provides a list of items that share
motifs from both branches. The middle circle shows the frequency of
corresponding symbols.

Beyond hypotheses about the symbols, the collection’s content, and the evolution
of SF traits, this early visualization also sparked new research questions
(discussed in greater detail in the next section) and ideas about further kinds
of visual explorations. We have since updated the original visualization through
several phases in order to respond to specific research questions that arose
during our interactions with the early visualizations and to feedback that we
solicited from non-specialists. We have discussed the details of these focus
groups elsewhere[12]
and will not repeat them here. Instead, we highlight briefly the resulting
changes to the early visualization interface that resulted in a more elaborate
visualization – the Speculative W@nderverse – to show how collaboration with
mixed-expertise audiences and with a developing visualization tool has
intrinsically shaped our research process, which in turn continues to shape the
development of the visualizations (see Fig. 8).

In presenting our early visualizations to mixed expertise audiences, we found
that even for people with little or no familiarity with the contents of the
Gibson anthologies, interacting with the visualizations led to discoveries and
generated hypotheses about the contents of the collection. Users reported
learning things they had not known in mere minutes of interacting with the tool
and many left with questions they hoped to explore further. Based on user
feedback we have implemented a number of new features.

Figure 8.

The Speculative W@nderverse – a result of our experimental visualization
approach.

In addition to the aforementioned interactive timeline that allows users to
narrow searches to items published during specific segments of time, and/or to
plot the distributions of items associated with user-selected symbols and
motifs, we have included more targeted search functions that allow users to
search the collection by author, keyword, and publication venue to address new
research questions that arose as we interacted with the early visualization. We
have also re-designed the entry point to the visualization to reflect the
interpretative character of our visualization approach to the Gibson collection;
the letters composing the new title of our visualization interface are from
Gibson’s anthology covers themselves and thus show how our approach borrows from
Gibson’s own scrapbooking approach (see Fig. 9).

The Speculative W@nderverse visualization includes a more prominent view of the
anthology covers with Gibson’s original tables of contents and artwork; clicking
on an anthology cover in the item view brings up a high resolution image of this
very cover. We have also since incorporated another view of Bleiler’s motifs
into the visualization in the form of a tag cloud. Once again challenging
Bleiler’s own hierarchy, the frequency of the keywords across Gibson’s items
determines the size of the keyword tag, rather than the numerical order created
by Bleiler, and each of these tags reflects a node in the radial diagram. While
the radial diagram is easily used by scholars familiar with Bleiler’s motifs,
the cloud allows general-interest users to scan quickly through the most
relevant keywords for the Gibson anthologies. Clicking on a word highlights the
node, just as clicking on a node highlights the word in the tag cloud. Following
the feedback of our users, we also added a connecting line between the node and
keyword that appears when the user hovers over the node, thus emphasizing
further the connection between these two views. Just as with the radial diagram,
the tag cloud adjusts based on any filters utilized, and when a motif is
selected, only co-occurring motifs remain in the cloud. Our visualizations are
therefore evolving and developing along with our research process, and are
engaged in a continual effort to meet the needs of the tool’s diverse audiences.
The Specultative W@nderverse in its current form can be considered a milestone
in our process, but not a final result – further visualization experiments that
focus, for example, on incorporating more strongly the material and visual
aesthetics of the Gibson anthologies, will follow.

Discussion and Conclusion

With the help of our evolving experimental visualizations, we have deciphered
numerous Gibson symbols to date, have begun to rethink definitions and
categorizations of early SF, and have broken down our necessarily broad initial
research questions into more targeted questions. These more targeted questions
have led us to supplement exploratory with more targeted search functions in our
visualization, and are now fueling new, more analytical visualizations.

As with any project that hopes to grapple with what Moretti calls the "great unread", progress is slow, but this is
particularly true when grappling with an unusually long-lived genre. As Moretti
notes in passing while discussing the average longevity of different genres, SF
is unique in that it has lasted for more than 100 years with no sign of abating
[Moretti 2005, 31] – unlike most other genres, which he
found lasted about 25-30 years on average [Moretti 2005, 20].
This longevity and the great diversity of works considered part of the SF genre
suggests the need to consider historically-specific (and thus changing)
sub-genres, hybrid genres, and micro-genres of what might be considered a
complex mega-genre uniquely characteristic of modernity.

While expansive — but certainly not exhaustive — the Gibson collection offers
possible ways to begin characterizing the vast array of periodical-based SF as
it changed over time. We will continue to compare his choices with those of
scholars and to consider the limitations of his collection. This pilot study,
focusing on 72 of the total 890 Gibson anthologies, begins with the earliest
works compiled by Gibson (starting in the 1840s through to the early 1900s).
Even this more modest time period entails going through more than a thousand
items. The current exploratory visualizations (which continue to evolve and
result in new visualization experiments) and the process of developing them have
certainly assisted us in beginning to characterize the anthologies and to
understand their potential contribution to SF studies. However, they also
highlight the messiness inherent in the evolution of genres that might be
obscured by neatly organized, result-oriented static visuals that seem to
promise self-evident conclusions. For example, we have several items that occur
within the Gibson anthologies that cannot be coded with any of Bleiler’s motifs,
and so become difficult to represent within our current
visualizations[13]. We are also aware that different
research questions or interests would necessarily create different
classifications for the Gibson items than the ones that we are applying. Our
tool is thus best understood as a particular lens that allows us to zoom in on
the messy period of proto-SF, offering a view that must be tempered with the
views of existing and ongoing SF scholarship. This means recognizing that our
tool, no less than any other interpretation of the period, comes with its own
exclusions and limitations. We therefore maintain that, more than simply
providing certain kinds of results (such as helping to decipher the Gibson
symbols), developing and incorporating interactive visualizations throughout a
research process inevitably showcases the limitations of one’s choices at every
step, the multiplicity of approaches possible and the multitude of questions
that splinter into further questions, without ever suggesting the
incontestability or stability of results.

The deciphering of Gibson symbols continues to rely both on our careful perusal
of Gibson’s marginalia and any clues we may find therein and on the
visualizations that help suggest and test a variety of hypotheses about their
meaning. In this case, the visualizations effectively work in tandem with more
traditional modes of archival work. The rethinking of definitions and
categorizations of SF is a more fraught process, in part because it everywhere
leads to the limitations both of early scholarly attempts and of the current
attempt, but such rethinking also offers a sobering check that balances the
promise of definitive knowledge, which implicitly comes with attempts to account
for the "great unread".

The visualizations have perhaps been most successful in helping to refine and
rethink research questions and possible ways to work towards answers. We began
this project with fairly broad questions about how a fan-curated collection
might contribute to scholarly understandings of the history of SF. However, as
we gathered and began to visualize data from the collection, we started to think
through the differing perspectives of the diverse audiences the tool might reach
and we began to ask more clearly articulated questions. Some questions directly
responded to the early visualization, such as: 1) What are the relationships or
points of contrast between two particular symbols? or 2) How could we better
represent the interaction between Gibson’s classifications and those of Bleiler
through the visualization? Such questions led to changes to the visualization
itself through both our radial tree diagram and our tag cloud. Other questions
were suggested by our interactions with the visualization as we attempted to
decipher the Gibson symbols. These include, for example: 1) Are certain Gibson
symbols more commonly associated with certain source magazines and/or with
certain authors and/or time periods? 2) Do Gibson’s symbols and/or Bleiler’s
motifs suggest specific hybrid or sub-genres of SF that are specific to
particular decades and/or periodicals? 3) Is there a difference between the
kinds of topics treated by male or female writers? Such questions emerged from
the ease with which the visualization provides simultaneous information on
multiple variables and led us to incorporate more targeted filters mentioned
above. As our questions narrow, we are also considering whether we should
maintain a tool that tries to address both public and academic audiences
simultaneously, or whether the increasing specificity of our research questions
will eventually necessitate multiple separate tools. As we think of new
iterations and/or new separate visualizations, we are also considering questions
for future research, including: 1) Could we develop a way to compare Gibson’s
selections from specific periodicals with the materials he rejected from these
same periodicals in order to better understand his selection process? 2) How can
we include images of Gibson’s notes and marginalia in the visualizations so as
to promote the analysis of his editorial function? 3) How can we further
represent the material qualities of Gibson’s unique hand-crafted anthologies in
the visualization?

In this paper, we have focused primarily on the early stages of our research into
the untapped Gibson anthologies to showcase specifically the value of
incorporating visualization early on into the research process, when research is
arguably in its most exploratory stages. This approach is in direct alliance
with our developing methodology, which takes inspiration from Moretti’s
attention to the evolution of genres through stylistic mutations, even while
adapting his approach in order to include expert amateur knowledge and to
integrate visualizations throughout the research process (not just
to support an argument about results). Furthermore, we utilize open-ended data
explorations in developing more flexible classification systems of SF. Based on
the premise that, as many have noted, "we think through, with, and alongside media"
[Hayles 2012, 1], this pilot project specifically showcases that the interactive
co-development of tool and research processes can be fruitful, especially in
fostering discoveries in complex, little-known collections. While the benefits
of displaying empirical research results through visualizations are well-known
and visualizations have historically been called upon to serve this purpose more
than any other [Drucker 2014], the use of interactive
visualizations to help researchers and non-researchers experiment and play with
collected data is increasingly recognized.[14]
Developing visualizations collaboratively (with scholars in both literary
studies and computer science) promotes creative play and problem-solving across
disciplines, and allows for visualizations that are uniquely suited to the
collection under study. If the trend in DH seems to be toward developing generic
tools that are applicable to almost any data set, we argue that there is also
room for tools tailored to the specific questions raised by utterly unique
collections that may be of interest both within and beyond scholarly circles.
While we recognize that such an approach is resource-intensive, it also promises
a more substantial pay-off for a wider, mixed-expertise audience.[15]

As we continue our work, our team will be providing the latest iteration of this
visualization online and soliciting more feedback on the tool from a wider
audience to continue to tailor the tool to the needs of different audiences and
to allow for possible collaborations with expert amateurs in future research
projects on this unique collection. For now, however, we hope we have begun to
show the value of an exploratory, fan-driven approach to the "great unread" of early SF, and of open-ended,
interactive information visualization tailored to the content and aesthetic
characteristics of a unique collection.

Acknowledgements

We thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the
Calgary Institute for the Humanities, the University of Calgary’s Special
Collections and Libraries and Cultural Resources, and Jason Reid (University of
Calgary, Faculty of Arts IT) for their support of this project.

Notes

[1]Although not numerous, there are some
items from French-language magazines.

[2]Images are
courtesy of Special Collections, Taylor Family Digital Library of the
University of Calgary.

[3]Although magazine-based early SF is
routinely overlooked, it bears mentioning that histories of the genre also
neglect much of published SF more generally. This is because of their
dependence on "traditional historiographic tactics of identifying
inventors and originators, great men (and occasionally women),
linear lines of descent, national tempers"
[Luckhurst 2010, 9]. Recent efforts to "expand" our understanding of SF by salvaging
neglected writers (including many women writers) and studying more carefully
the cultural context of SF must be commended, but they tend to focus more on
later, 20th-century SF rather than early SF.

[5]This figure does not
include women who wrote anonymously or used initials or a male
pseudonym.

[6] See, for example,
Moretti’s examination of clues in detective fiction in Graphs, Maps, Trees and "The Slaughterhouse
of Literature".

[7] Many critics agree that
the SF genre begins to achieve its modern form in the 1880s and 90s, but
even then it obviously "did not simply spring into being"
[Stableford 2004, 3]. GEP skips this formative period altogether. It also excludes
serialized fiction, which was popular in the early years of SF.

[8] Based on
the careful examination of Gibson’s marginalia in the anthologies, we have
come to understand these symbols as Gibson’s self-conscious efforts to
classify the works he compiled in his anthologies. His notes, although
cryptic at times, provide some clues about the significance of individual
symbols and his reasons for choosing one symbol over another.

[9]These include
D. H. Tuck’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and
Fantasy (1978), E. Naha’s The Science
Fictionary: An A-Z Guide to the World of SF Authors, Films, & TV
Shows (1980), J. Gunn’s The New
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988), M. Ashley’s Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp
Magazines From the Beginning to 1950 (2001), and B. Stableford’s
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
Literature (2004).

[15]The lack
of usability studies in the development of new DH tools and the low adoption
rate of such tools suggest that DH tool development is already
resource-intensive in light of its uncertain pay-off. As such, new
approaches to tool development should be explored to increase both usability
and tool adoption. See Gibbs and Owens 2012 and Schreibman 2010.

Works Cited

Ashley 2000 Ashley, M. (2000). The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp
Magazines from the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press.

Bleiler 1990 Bleiler, E. F. (1990). Science Fiction: The Early Years. Kent: Kent State
University Press.